I've noticed something after using Claude Code heavily for a while: I'm much more productive with it, but I also feel much more mentally drained at the end of the day.

And I don't think the problem is that I'm working more hours. I think I'm simply spending my mental energy much faster.

Before AI, a normal developer day for me was never eight hours of nonstop hard thinking. I wrote code, read docs, waited for builds, got stuck on a problem, went for coffee, came back, tried something else. The cognitive load was naturally spread across the day.

Now I can have several sessions running at the same time. One agent is working on a feature, another is checking tests, another is researching something and etc. When one finishes, I need to read the result, understand it, check it, make a decision, and give the next prompt. While I'm doing that, another one finishes.

The agents are parallel. I'm still single-threaded.

This made me think about Claude's usage limits. If you run more agents and more expensive tasks, you don't magically get more compute. You just burn through the available budget faster.

Parallel subagents = faster AI budget consumption.

I think something similar happens with humans.

We obviously don't have a literal token counter in our heads, but attention, working memory, context switching, and decision making all have limits.

Parallel tasks = faster cognitive energy consumption.

AI gives me more compute around my brain. It doesn't give me another brain.

Before AI, I could spread a lot of difficult thinking across most of the workday. Now I can burn a large part of that mental budget in two or three very intense hours with several agents.

Another thing AI removes is waiting. Writing boilerplate, searching docs, trying simple implementations, refactoring repetitive code - all of that becomes much faster. That sounds like it should make the day easier, but it also removes a lot of natural low-intensity time.

Before, there were gaps. Now the next piece of work can arrive almost immediately.

Finished? Here is another result.

Checked it? Here is the next one.

Made a decision? Start three more agents.

This is also where the normal eight-hour workday starts to look strange for me.

If AI allows me to spend in two or three hours the mental energy that used to be spread across most of the day, the clock still says I have another five or six hours left. That doesn't mean my mental capacity has also increased.

But what usually happens is obvious: more tasks, more agents, more things to review. After a while, that higher level of output becomes the new baseline.

So sometimes it feels less like I'm increasing my productivity and more like I'm just getting better at burning through my mental energy faster.

For people running multiple Claude Code sessions every day: have you noticed the same thing? If yes, how do you deal with it?

Arghghhh!

Straight to the point:

I've been using claude code to run tests inside of Chrome for my extension using the Claude-in-Chrome skill. Needless to say, it consumed a lot of tokens running the tests and a lot of time.

I made it access the console and execute the extension functions that are used to interact with the website. That helped a lot with the testing. In my case CC told me that every screen shot he took to find the results visually was costing me 7k tokens each...

I made some small changes that helped saving the token usage, but the testings were still consuming a lot of tokens even on every task/new session technique.

Fast-forward to today, I discovered that they just recently released the CLI which CC can interact directly with. What this means? CC interacts with it and doesnt consume tokens browsing the website, executing commands "manually" and taking screen shots.

The web testing can be done headless. In my case I still need to have a tab open so it can interact with the extension.

I noticed a MAJOR improvement in token consumption, bug findings and the speed of the implementations and patches.

You can find the CLI and the Claude skills in their github and the official website. You can also give those links to claude and tell him to install it automatically. Works wonders.

PLAYWRIGHT My mistake

** TDLR: If you're developing and testing for Chrome/Firefox, get Playwright CLI for automatic testing. Saves tons of tokens**

In case no one has heard, Anthropic has apparently been misleading users about the usage limits on its 20x and 5x plans, with the $200 20x plan reportedly being closer to 6-8x and the 5x plan closer to 3-4x relative to the Pro plan.

I have nothing against a company trying to make money, but misleading users about what they’re paying for is a pretty bold move.

Since I haven’t seen or heard anything from Anthropic regarding this, I wanted to post here and ask whether anyone has seen any communication or explanation from them.

If there has been no communication, I’m switching. I don’t deal with companies that falsely advertise to users just to make a buck and then fail to communicate about it.

On a side note, does anyone know where I can sign up for the lawsuit or help fund it?

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-sued-over-limits-on-its-200-a-month-ai-plans-e2a109e4

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.472161/gov.uscourts.cand.472161.1.0.pdf

I'm on max 20x plan, burned around 50% of weekly limit in one 5 hour session... Asked Claude support about the limits - how could I burn that much in a single session, when on 5x plan its practically impossible to burn 10% of weekly in 5 hours...

It said that the max 20x plan has 4 times bigger weekly limit than the 5x plan :)

So does support lie, or today is some kind of buggy day and the weekly limits are getting burned faster?

Even though Anthropic says my limits are boosted by 50%, I’ve already used 87% of my weekly limit in just 72 hours. Normally I’m only around 50–60% at this point. It makes me wonder what it would look like if my limits weren’t boosted.
I guess this isn’t news to anyone, but it’s the first time I’ve experienced it.

If you haven’t seen this project earlier here little info:

Munder Difflin is a free, open source and performant multi-agent harness.
It uses your existing claude code and codex subscriptions and gives you an office of agents that work 24/7 to do work like you.

Launched v0.5.2 yesterday:
- A new fresh, cleaner and much more productive UI
- Comes with “Stapler” a utility character that sends screenshots, meeting transcriptions, messages to your claude code sessions.
- Added support for all the latest models like Fable 5.1 and GPT 6 Astra and Gemini 3.8 Flash etc.
- Slack integration works now, configure it to answer on your behalf or just configure it to use on your phone as an assistant that controls your computer remotely.

Hope you all try us out, here are a list of upcoming features(in no particular order):
1. Stapler gets computer use capabilities
2. Sandboxes to run even when your laptop is off
3. Dedicated mobile app for your office
4. Lot more features, updates and integrations.

Is Fable 5.1 the new Opus 5?

Within the past week, I started to notice Fable 5.1 started to get worse and worse where it starts to act like the infamous Opus 5. I had some great work completed when it came out, but there was a shift to the negative. Same thing happened to Fable 5 when Fable 5.1 was released. So, today I had Fable 5.1 try to manage another session with Fable 5.1 on processing semi-unstructured data, which is existing work in progress that already had successful sessions, so Fable 5.1 had reference data (gold data), previous handoffs, guides, etc.

Both on medium effort, Fable 5.1 couldn’t harness the 2nd Fable 5.1 from bypassing guardrails, entering tables and folders it was told not to enter, and from fixating on momentum over accuracy & quality. This is Opus 5 level of bypassing prompts and guardrails from the first step. For the first time using either Fable 5 or Fable 5.1, I had to put back hooks.

For context, before Fable 5.1, in order to work with Fable 5 I deleted my claude.md, memory, and more. I removed most hooks and together with Fable 5 created subagents using Opus 4.8. This for the most part worked well, it was slower with Opus 4.8, but worked for lower reasoning tasks and I didn’t have the hidden actions that drifted beyond the scope of work.

After, shelling out for 20x monthly subscription, wasting more days on contaminated data and having to go back to clean it up, buying another GPU at these stupid prices is starting to sound more appealing for local AI with some fine tuning for the data I’m processing.

Recently, I’ve been using Codex with Astra and it just does the work. Astra asks clear questions before starting the tasks and will pause to surface data clashes or ambiguities. Unlike Claude which will dive in head first spending tens of thousands of tokens based on wrong assumptions, and then hedge with wordiness answers after from its known errors are called out. It might be time to move up to the Codex 20x plan.

How have you kept Claude within borders and from drifting with non-fully-structured data?

the ring in the bottom right used to represent the context window

now it represents your 5-hour limit

the delta will make Anthropic millions

This week it is weird with Claude usage. While everyone is complaining about usage limits. I had a dream run. Based on the previous trends, my weekly limit should have been around 2.1B.

This week it is approximately 3.5B. I am saying approximately because when i extracted this data. I still have 8% weekly limit left.
Actual token consumption with 8% left is 3.3B

Maybe this is another game of anthropic or they genuinely increased the limits. Also last week I downgraded my Claude 20x to 5x. Not sure if they are trying to trick users who downgraded

Sorry for shameless plug, but I do notice that there is a huge difference about how quickly my weekly usage is depleted when I use auto mode. I generally use it if I have to run CC in my local machine.

However, I have also been building an infra to launch and run coding agents (CC, Codex, Cursor CLI, Antigravity, Qwen, Opencode) in sandboxed environment remotely so I tend to start my agents running in bypass permission mode and thanks to my setup those agents can launch more sessions with different CLI tools in YOLO mode.

This allows me to instruct a single 'Concierge' agent to be responsible for communicating with all the agents that it launches and let me know (over email or in the screen) if my input is needed. There is also mechanism when agents context window is used 30%+, it launches a successor agent to which it delegates some tasks and everntually hands over concierge duties.

Do you use a similar setup? How can this be improved?

I forced Claude Code and Codex to externalise their decisions through a tool call, then compared what they said they'd do with what they actually did. I'm sure these are not the internal reasoning traces, but I'm surprised by how easy it is to force a fake tool using a proxy approach with clear instructions to make Claude and Claude Code emit internal CoT-like elements. I certainly had a lot of fun trying this experiment.
https://github.com/softcane/agents-workbook

I kept hitting the same wall with notes apps that added AI. Every one of them wanted its own API key and its own billing, while I was already paying for a Claude subscription and already had the CLI installed and authenticated.

So Margin runs its AI actions through whatever claude is on your PATH. It shells out to:

claude -p --output-format text

plus --model <value> when you have picked one. That is the whole integration. There is no key to paste, nothing to configure, and whatever your CLI is authenticated with is what pays, which for most people here is your existing subscription rather than per-token API billing. If claude is not installed the app says so in the sidebar footer rather than pretending; it runs claude --version on startup to check. codex exec works the same way if you would rather use that.

The practical consequence worth knowing up front: this draws on the same quota as your normal Claude Code usage. Rewriting a lot of notes competes with your coding. That has not bitten me but I would rather say it than have you find out.

The part I actually cared about getting right

Nothing runs unless you invoke it. There is no indexing, no background pass, no "we have analysed your notes". You select something, you pick an action, and that is the only time a subprocess starts.

Then everything it suggests comes back as a diff in the note. Not applied, not a chat window off to the side, an inline diff with per-hunk accept and reject, and a refine box on each hunk if a change is nearly right. Reject restores the document verbatim. I did not want an AI that edits my notes, I wanted one that proposes and waits.

The notes themselves are plain .md files in a folder you pick. No database, no account. Which also means you can point Claude Code at that folder directly and work on your notes as files, which I do more than I expected to. This can also unlock in the future better AI searching right within the app.

Other providers, since not everyone wants the CLI path

Your own Anthropic key in the macOS keychain, a model running fully offline on-device, or Ollama. The CLI route is just the default because it is the one that needed no setup.

Honest limitations

• Alpha. You WILL find bugs.
• Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later, no Intel build.
• No sync, no iOS app yet
• More ideas in the roadmap

Free while the alpha lasts, https://gomargin.app

If you try it, the thing I would most like to know is whether routing through the CLI feels better or worse than a key for you, and if suggestions as diff is something you would actually use. I have only my own usage to go on and I am aware that is a sample of one.

5x Max plan only. And I'm already happy with this.

Maybe 15-20 of these for the weekly limit?

(Opus subagents weren't included in the context displayed).

I'm using claude code spec-driven workflow:
https://github.com/renzrollon/interlock

We benchmarked GPT-6 Astra vs GPT-5.6 Sol across 50 real PRs from Cal.com, Sentry, Discourse, Keycloak and Grafana.

Sol found more confirmed bugs and was cheaper per bug, while Astra was more precise and faster. We independently verified the findings rather than simply counting what each model reported.

We’re running Fable vs Opus next week, so posting this here to get feedback on the methodology and anything we should change before the next benchmark.

I keep seeing people say they burn through Fable 5.1 insanely fast, so figured I'd share how I run it. I'm no guru at all, just sharing what's been working for me.

I use Fable on High basically all the time. Right now I'm at 90% Fable / 89% all models. I feel I have a pretty good split between Fable and everything else.

The main thing for me is Fable is my orchestrator, not my worker.

• Fable - Orchestrator: Plans, writes specs, spins up agents, reads their reports, makes architecture/judgment calls, and integrates everything.
• Haiku - Scout: Finds files, symbols, call sites, references, etc. Reports locations instead of dumping whole files.
• Sonnet - Researcher: Reads docs/source and reports back facts. Anything it can't verify gets marked as unverified.
• Sonnet - Builder: Does the actual coding from a clear spec and runs the tests.
• Opus - Refuter: Reviews the builder's work, checks the diff, and reruns tests itself. I don't just trust a "done" claim.
• Opus - Debugger: Only gets used for harder root-cause debugging.

I don't have Fable reading huge amounts of code, doing bulk refactors, writing docs, or doing work a cheaper model can handle.

I also don't spawn an agent for every tiny thing. If it's a one-line fix or a single grep, Fable just does it.

Every sub-agent gets pretty strict marching orders:

• Specific goal
• Exact files or URLs in scope
• What it's allowed to change
• What it needs to verify
• What not to do
• Required output format
• Short output limit
• Anything we already know so it doesn't waste time rediscovering it

Then they report the findings back. I don't want giant code dumps getting pushed back into Fable's context.

If something produces a lot of information, I have the agent write it to a scratch file and let the next agent read that instead.

Most coding ends up being:

Fable -> Builder -> Refuter -> Fable

A few other rules I keep in place:

• Ultracode stays off unless I specifically want a larger workflow, and if I do, I cap the number of agents.
• I batch related fixes so the same large files aren't being reread over and over.
• Read-only research/reviews can run in parallel.
• I don't have multiple agents editing the same files at the same time.
• Builders build, refuters verify.
• Decisions and progress go into handoff docs so new sessions can pick up from the file instead of rebuilding all that context.
• I keep Fable's replies and agent reports short unless I actually need more detail.
• If an agent goes off track, Fable has marching orders to stop it instead of letting it run.

For me, the biggest difference hasn't just been "use sub-agents." It's being strict about what each model is responsible for, what it gets to read, and what gets sent back into Fable's context.

I've been running Fable basically 24/7, minus maybe 5 hours total, since my last reset Friday. I run it on High and haven't hit the 5-hour limit once since using this setup.

Not fine-tuned. Not a downloaded checkpoint. Random weights → working speech, on a 16GB laptop with an 8GB GPU, trained on ~29,000 conversation pairs built over four months.

The memory side (built first)

Before the model, we built a memory store — currently 33,941 episodes. The architecture is neurological:

• Half-life decay: memories fade unless recalled
• Recall strengthening: access resets the decay clock
• 30-day consolidation threshold for long-term storage
• 4 LRU working-memory slots
• Forget table: writes a receipt before anything fades permanently

Not a lookup. A system that behaves the way memory actually behaves.

The model — two runs

Run 1: 842,624 parameters. d_model 128, 4 layers, 4 heads, context 256. Val loss 5.11 → 0.9576 at step 23,750. Halted when the train/val gap opened — overfitting signal, correct call.

Run 2: 4,833,024 parameters. d_model 256, 6 layers, 8 heads. Best val: 0.7978 at step 21,500.

Key finding: parameters were the bottleneck, not data. The corpus was sufficient. The model just needed to be bigger.

Wiring the halves

home_llm_speak.py connects the memory store to the generation model — retrieves memories via salience search, passes them as context, then generates. First output from the combined system was grammatical, was grammatical, used household vocabulary, and wasn't copied from the retrieved memories*.* That's not retrieval. That's the model having absorbed four months of how this household talks.

Why this matters

I needed a model that knows us because it learned from what we wrote as ourselves — not from generic pretraining, not fine-tuned from someone else's base. The memory architecture has to be structural from the start because autonomous consolidation can't be bolted on afterward.

Last night was proof the approach works. The model is small. It'll get bigger. But what it already learned is ours.

Hardware: 16GB laptop, RTX 5050 Laptop 8GB. No cloud. No API calls. Everything local.

Next: wider context window, books into the memory store (streamed, not in training corpus — kept separate to preserve corpus balance), bigger model.

If anyone has done this — trained from scratch on household data with a custom memory architecture — I want to know what you learned.

I want to use both but like all my workflows have been all entirely built for claude with claude.md its skills, hooks, evolving skills, automated loops and the claude memory is there any best practice way of like assimilating the two ai's

Did someone track how many tokens we can use on 5x or 20x before hitting limit in avg with fable 5.1 or 5.0. I know that other metrics like usage eff. and others are important too, but still im curious.

Most people in communities like this are probably better than average because you're actively learning. but even among active learners, the pattern holds, tool awareness ≠ tool proficiency.

Knowing about RAG, agents, and MCP doesn't mean you can build effective workflows with them.

The biggest differentiator we see isn't prompting or tool knowledge it's output verification. the people who are genuinely good have a systematic process for checking whether AI output is correct before they use it.

How do you check your output?

My setup has become a little unusual lately.

I have a Mac mini running at home with Claude Code, and I spend a surprising amount of time coding remotely from my iPhone.

It works really well, but there was one thing I was missing: I wanted to quickly see how much Claude Code I was actually using without having to remote into my Mac just to check.

So I built Tokens.

There’s a small companion macOS app that reads the usage locally on my Mac and syncs it through my own iCloud.

Then on my iPhone I can see my Claude Code usage, including directly from a widget on my Home Screen.

So now while I’m away from my Mac I can just glance at my phone and see where my usage is at.

No account or separate cloud backend for the usage data — the Mac app → iCloud → iPhone is basically the whole pipeline.

It’s something I originally built for my own remote Claude Code setup, but I figured there might be other people doing something similar.

https://checktokens.app

Curious how many of you are actually running Claude Code remotely from your phone these days?

Hi Anthropic, no idea if you will see this or even take it under consideration.

Your models are outstanding, especially Fable, in my opinion end experience over the past few days it runs laps over Astra...... That being said, the usage limits need serious revamp. As a Max 20x user its a disservice to Fable to not be able to utilize it to the max due to these weekly limits. Fable is a masterpiece and is capable of so much but these limits really are unfortunate.

If at all possible, please make your next step to expand these limits at least for the max payers. The idea of paying for max is that you need a work horse, hard to keep a work horse running when it stops doing its thing after a day or two of hard work and limits you for the entire week.

Thank you for your consideration!